[tags]safe, children, internet, watchers, monitor, education, e-learning[/tags]
I’ve just read this article and it touches on a favourite subject of mine.

I’ve long been an advocate of keeping children safe but not to the detriment of them having good, clean, safe fun. In a previous job my role was to ensure all the schools in my local authority have high speed internet access. Beyond that the mandate was to assist in e-learning and to keep the schools safe from the usual threats of spyware, malware, virus, etc, etc - that bit I found easy but I wanted to take it all a step further and ensure the children had a fun but safe time using our modern digital world and to do so put me in direct confrontation with several groups.

The first was my boss - he didn’t understand why I, as the man who physically installed and setup the new schools network, should be involved in keeping it secure. After all “that doesn’t generate me any income” he stated.

The second group was the teachers. They wanted the old style approach (albeit slow) of being able to access everything and especially the group I refer to as the ‘hippy brigade’ because they were the reactionaries who fought me all the way. They believe in total freedom but I personally believe that has led us to the debauched nation we are now. These same teachers were the ones who believed it was their job to allow the children free reign to do whatever they wanted online so long as it didn’t interfere with what they were doing - and that wasn’t teaching (but don’t start me on that one).

The third group was the parents - some didn’t care what little Johnny or Jane did but others did care with most being in the middle wanting some form of control.

The last group was the children - they, like their hippy brigade teachers wanted total free access to everything.

And once a lawyer wanted to know how we monitored, filtered, protected, etc …. but that’s another story.

I guess the question arises with all of these groups is “just what do you want me to lock down, if anything?”. I don’t believe any responsible parent would allow their child total freedom at home (or out of it) to do what and go where they want. The article talks about how modern day parents have restricted their children in their freedoms due to fears that on the whole should be irrational fears. When I was a child I had freedom but with that freedom came a responsibility to be back by certain times. To advise my parents where I was. To not damage other peoples property and so on and so forth. Now, so the article says, we severely restrict that freedom. Compared to the 1970’s only 9% of primary school aged children make their own way to school, back then it was 80%.

This post isn’t about trying to address that issue, but about trying to address what is responsible control (be it parenting or moderation of content) and how do we decide who has the final say so. In my old job, after I’d convinced my boss of his narrow view I became referred to as the network god or hitler. If, so the rumours went, I didn’t like it then it got blocked. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I set out to create individual policies for each and every school - 72 of them as I recall. For sure there was a default policy but I visited every school and made sure every IT coordinator and every head and every technician (they were the loudest grumblers) knew what the basic policy was and more importantly that they knew how to get this changed.

All I asked for was a signed(by the head or head of IT), school headed note, stating what they wanted changing with no questions asked from me. So what if the local Catholic school asked for un-monitored access to the internet for their staff but not the children? I didn’t question that but I did put it before my bosses. Not surprisingly that got rejected. I kept both the request and the rejection notes - I wanted to ensure there was total transparency in my actions and that I appeared cleaner than a clean thing on clean day.

So who should have the final say? Changes to laws make it easy for me to be sued because I say or do something that infringes on another’s human rights. However, I guess my skin is thicker than most and I am definitely from the old school with a lot of modern thinking thrown in of parenting or control - that is to say, those above me, be they my parents, my boss or people I respect or even people placed in a position because I don’t want to go there (e.g. a politician) - are people I will listen to and on the whole obey. Where I don’t want to obey it comes only after much debate with said person as to why I disagree or why I can’t fit in with their approach.

Do you agree with me? Should we control our children to what might appear to be their detriment and allow them to understand there are always restrictions in life or do we need to slip back into the 60’s way of thinking which is to let everyone do their own thing and to hell in a hand basket with the consequences?